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Career: Educated as a geologist, like his father. Began painting when he was 20.

Family: Married fellow artist Galina Popova; they had three children, Masha, Lev and Liza, whose tiny handprints appear to float atop some of Rukhin's works.

His artwork:

• Created abstract works with an emphasis on geometric shapes, considered radical by communist authorities. In an officially anti-religious nation, Rukhin crafted works reflecting his attraction to church architecture. Foreign diplomats helped smuggle his work out of the Soviet Union.

• Persecuted by the KGB in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He believed his apartment was bugged.

• In May 1976, a fire consumed Rukhin's studio. He died of smoke inhalation. His wife believed the KGB had something to do with it. In 1978, Rukhin's family fled the Soviet Union and eventually moved to Texas.

Family dispute over paintings:

• Popova brought 300 of Rukhin's paintings to the U.S. when the family fled the Soviet Union. They have been fighting over ownership of them ever since.

When Elizabeth “Liza” Rukhina woke up one morning in February 2008, her collection of paintings was gone from her Olmos Park apartment.

About 20 works. All by her father's hand. Valued at $2 million. Gone.

Like every good story, this case — initially considered the largest art heist in local history — has a twist. Several, in fact.

Her father, a dissident Soviet artist, had died in a studio fire in 1976 that some suspected was set by the KGB.

Rukhina, a wispy blonde whose words sometimes flow together in an idiosyncratic tumble, told Olmos Park police she believed her mother, while on a visit, took the paintings and stored them. Months later, she speculated, her brother took them to Los Angeles.

More than four years later, after the tiny Olmos Park Police Department sank hundreds of hours into its investigation, and after the Bexar County district attorney's office negotiated with her brother's attorney, Rukhina has most of her paintings back.

The DA's office is closing the case without filing charges.

“We could not prove ... a crime had been committed by the mother or the brother,” said Adriana Biggs, chief of the DA's white-collar-crimes division. “As you can imagine, inner family dynamics and agreements and disputes — in any situation like that, things are not always black and white.”

Rukhina, 38, is furious. The case should remain open, she said, because three paintings, potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, still are missing. Biggs said the ownership of those paintings is debatable.

Rukhina's brother, Lev Rukhin, did not return calls for comment.

'Dangerous for life!'

Yevgeny Rukhin was born in the Russian town of Saratov in 1943 as war with Germany raged. He was tall, outgoing, with a reddish-brown mane balanced by an equally disheveled beard. He loved vodka shots chased by pickles, a fellow artist recalled in a 2009 book about Rukhin.

Educated as a geologist like his father, Rukhin began painting at about age 20, bucking both family legacy and the government-sanctioned art style called “socialist realism.” With little artistic training, he created abstract works with an emphasis on geometric shapes, considered radical by communist authorities.

In an officially anti-religious nation, he crafted works reflecting his attraction to church architecture, some of which made their way to an exhibit in New York in the late 1960s.

Rukhin married fellow artist Galina Popova, and they had three children, Masha, Lev and Liza, whose tiny handprints appear to float atop some of his works.

He began incorporating found objects, bits of furniture or newspaper on white backgrounds, sometimes dramatized with blocks of bright red paint, to “express my nostalgia for former Russia,” he once wrote. “I am an optimist by nature, and am certain that our works will be widely exhibited throughout Russia.”

But some of his art seemed to foretell that day never would come, like those stamped with the Russian phrase, “Dangerous for Life!”

The phrase appeared on warning signs the same way a skull and crossed bones are used here, said Sarah Predock Burke, a retired Trinity University professor of Russian who met Rukhin abroad and helped get his paintings to U.S. exhibitions.

“He would put that on a lot of paintings, 'Dangerous for life!' Because his paintings were dangerous,” Burke said. “What he was doing, the government was trying to stop at the time.”

His studio was in Leningrad, but many customers were foreign diplomats based in Moscow who smuggled paintings home, fellow artists recalled.

Rukhin helped organize Moscow's “bulldozer exhibit” of 1974, which made international headlines. Vigilantes — one witness said they were plainclothes police — ran bulldozers, dump trucks and a sprinkler vehicle through the outdoor exhibit, the New York Times reported.

Four artists, including Rukhin, and a photographer were convicted of petty hooliganism for resisting authorities. Three American reporters were beaten up, drawing a protest from the U.S. Embassy.

The persecution continued. His son, Lev, recalled in the 2009 book that someone hurled rocks through the windows of the family's apartment in 1976, shattering glass over his sister, Liza, then 2.

Weeks later, on May 24, a fire consumed the second-floor studio where Rukhin and three others were spending the evening. He died of smoke inhalation at age 32. A friend's wife also died.

“I will always feel that the KGB had something to do with the fire,” Popova told the San Antonio Express-News prior to an exhibition of her husband's work here in 1991. “He was a careful man and would never set fire to his studio. I think the KGB got him because he was too outspoken.”

Others said it just as easily could have started with a cigarette misplaced in his tinderbox workspace filled with wood scraps and oily rags.

Escape from the U.S.S.R.

In 1978, the family fled to Vienna and then to the United States.

“When my father was killed, (my mother) was told, 'You're welcome to leave. But if you stay, something like what just happened will happen to the rest of the family,'” Liza said in an interview about a year ago.

In an online travel essay, Lev remembered how Popova woke the children and told them to toss what they wanted in the back of an old car.

“It was pandemonium, my older sister Masha tearing her favorite sketches off the walls while weeping hysterically, my mom handing furniture out to passers-by, Liza walking about with her security blanket,” he wrote.

Though free from government harassment, the family members' lives in the United States have been far from smooth.

Initially in New York, they moved to Texas when Popova became a jewelry artist for James Avery in the early 1980s, Liza said. Burke, who had about 125 Rukhin paintings, returned all but a handful to the family members when they emigrated.

In the 2009 book, Lev wrote that his mother brought along most of his father's 300 paintings and gave him 40 of them as his inheritance when he turned 18.

“I loaded them into the back of the truck, and lugged them from one apartment to another year after year,” he wrote. “Deep down inside, I half-wished someone would steal them, for they were a sore reminder of the painful loss of my father, a representation of his absence.”

Lev Rukhin finally sold them to pay for motorcycle travel adventures, according to his essay.

Popova moved to California, but Liza said she was unhappy there and returned to live in her sister Masha's Alamo Heights home.The three children and the artist's mother still in Russia soon were embroiled in a lawsuit against Popova and a California art gallery owner to whom she had given the paintings. A settlement in 1990 divided up the collection, according to the police report.

In 1993, Masha committed suicide and her younger sister inherited the house and more of the art. She had to sell a few paintings to pay bills and property taxes and sold the home a few years later.

Having struggled through an eviction and other money problems, Liza was a single mother with two young daughters living in an Olmos Park apartment when her mother came to visit in 2008.

Popova had suggested her daughter auction a couple of paintings to buy a house, and they catalogued and photographed the collection, then stayed up late talking. But when Liza awoke the next morning, the paintings were gone.

Her mother told Liza she had taken the paintings to a nearby storage unit and gave her a receipt number and gate code. Liza told police her mother later acknowledged she had given Lev the keys. Liza had the lock cut. The unit was empty.

The police report noted the storage unit's tenant log included a March 2008 entry: “Customer called and advised that her son would be in to take the stuff out of the unit.”

Friends told police Lev flew to Texas and stopped by their house in early April after picking up Liza's paintings. According to the police report, he told the friends that he was afraid Liza would sell the art for “a less than wise purpose.”

Tracking the art

The case ranks at the top of an odd local list of missing art cases, which includes the theft of a pair of 500-pound lions from outside a law office, relics stolen from San Antonio's Spanish mission churches and the McFarlin diamond brooch — 49-plus carats — taken from the Witte Museum in 1968.

Though the value of the Rukhin paintings may fluctuate depending on the piece and the market, Sotheby's auctioned a single mixed-media composition in London in 2007 for about $114,000 at today's currency conversion rate.

In September 2009, a Texas Ranger and the Olmos Park Police Department's only investigator joined Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies in executing a warrant to search Lev's home and studio, according to a police report.

They found nine of Liza's paintings and paperwork indicating others had been sold in Los Angeles and London. They estimated the property recovered was worth about $340,000.

“Part of the problem with the initial recovery was that we didn't have full documentation of the inventory,” said Fred Solis, who until recently was Olmos Park's police chief. “We did recover what was available, everything that was there.”

The officers attempted to meet with Lev but were unsuccessful, the report said. At the time, Liza told police she received text messages and phone calls from her mother, brother and other family members asking what she wanted to make the investigators “go away.”

Solis said the team turned the case over to the DA's office, which negotiated the return of additional paintings — 23 in all, only 17 of which turned out to be Liza's.

About two weeks ago, Popova died in a Los Angeles hospital at age 75, a funeral home confirmed. Liza said she had heard her mother's health was failing.

Olmos Park police still have the six extra paintings locked in their closet-sized evidence room. Liza won't take them. She said they may be her mother's work, and don't belong in her collection, so they now will be returned to her brother, Biggs said.

Liza described three other paintings she says are hers and have yet to be returned. She wants the investigation to continue.

“It's like advertising free theft in Olmos Park,” she said. “I'm disappointed that it wasn't followed up on. ... I'm not made whole. This isn't whole.”

Solis said his officers pursued the case as far as they could.

“Sometimes, we may not be able to put someone in jail for an offense, but we can certainly do our best for our complainant, in terms of property recovery, in terms of victim assistance. That we do on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

The case always can be reopened if new information warrants it, Solis added.

“As you can imagine, the inventories are confusing,” Biggs said. “It just wasn't as clear as we would have liked.”